The history behind Captain Marvel’s super suit

Captain Marvel, the latest dispatch from the ever-expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe, was made to seem like it had the entire franchise riding on its shoulders. In some ways, it does.

Not only is it the last film released before the events of Avengers: Endgame (a movie that acts as, if not a period, then at least a very climactic comma within the MCU), but in the 20 films that encompass the franchise, Captain Marvel is the first to feature a solo female superhero. In a profile on its star, Brie Larson, the Hollywood Reporter described it as “the movie that definitely will not determine the entire fate of women forever and ever. Except that it will, a little.”

This is obviously a rather melodramatic take, but if the future of female superheroes is riding on the success of Captain Marvel, then it’ll look pretty different from those of the past, at least when it comes to the clothes.

We know the sleek, sexy catsuits of Black Widow, Storm, and Catwoman; we’ve got Wonder Woman’s strapless breastplate and miniskirt; and then there’s the X-Men’s Mystique, who for a large percentage of time wears nothing but body paint.

Notably, the super suits worn by Larson in Captain Marvel are not nearly as titillating. In fact, they look a little bit like something Chris Evans might wear as that other Avengers captain: form-fitting yet thick, with military-inspired armor around the arms, hips, chest, and abs. There are no cartoonish boob shields either, and unlike many female superheroes, Captain Marvel doesn’t always wear her hair down (one of her suits includes a helmet in which her hair sticks out like a mohawk; it’s very rad).

The reason is more complicated than what many angry Marvel fans, who have waged anti-Captain Marvel campaigns on YouTube and Rotten Tomatoes, might assume: that Marvel and Larson have conspired to make the film an empty shill for woke progressivism.

The real reason Captain Marvel’s costume doesn’t look like those of female superheroes of yore is a mix between her convoluted backstory, how illustrations of female comic book characters have evolved, and the character rights that Marvel happened to have at the time of the film’s greenlighting. Oh, yeah, there was a whole thing about a bet between a writer and an illustrator, too.

The history of why female superheroes were often sexified and hyper-feminine is kind of a no-brainer. For most of popular comic book history, men were the ones drawing these characters, and as Christina Dokou, an assistant professor of American literature and culture at the University of Athens, told me last year, this stereotype persists in 2019. “Even today, the physical attributes and feminine beauty of superheroines are exaggerated to make them look like, well, frankly, porn stars at worst, and sexy female athletes at best,” she said.

There’s a reason costumes like those Black Widow and Wonder Woman wear remain so conspicuously sexy into the 2010s, when more women are involved with the illustrating and costuming of comic book characters: These characters have a long and now-standard sartorial history. Black Widow, for instance, is a Russian spy who first showed up in 1964, and her black catsuit is derived from the very 1960s Hollywood concept that of course a Russian spy would be in a black catsuit.

Wonder Woman, meanwhile, has a highly visible legacy because of Lynda Carter’s personification in the 1970s television series — so much so that if Gal Gadot hadn’t shown up in the first trailer for the 2017 film in at least some version of the iconic costume, she wouldn’t really have felt like Wonder Woman at all.

Carol Danvers, the woman who becomes the titular character in Captain Marvel, however, does not share the same real estate in the minds of the average moviegoer. Her history is complicated and contradictory — she’s had multiple makeovers, physically and otherwise, since she first showed up in the late ’60s. (And not to make things more complicated, but “Captain Marvel” is also a title that has been given to multiple superheroes in Marvel history.)

But the Carol Danvers that’s now part of the MCU is a far more recent invention. She comes from less than a decade ago, in September 2012, when comic writer Kelly Sue DeConnick released Captain Marvel No. 1, a comic book that for the first time gave Carol Danvers a solid backstory and made her a much more significant part of the Marvel universe, and that sold out immediately.

Whereas previous iterations of Carol Danvers (back when she was Ms. Marvel) depicted her in essentially a bathing suit, a domino mask, and opera gloves, DeConnick’s version put her in a military-inspired suit that nodded to Danvers’s experience in the Air Force, plus the helmet that swept Danvers’s blond hair up into a mohawk. That look was actually the result of a bet made between DeConnick and the comics artist Jamie McKelvie, who was known for his eye for fashion but whose rate was too steep for Marvel to approve.

DeConnick, however, fought for him, and told him that if he redesigned the Captain Marvel costume for Carol Danvers and Marvel didn’t buy it, that she would pay for his work herself. (Luckily, Marvel ended up buying the design.)

Susana Polo, the comics editor for Polygon, explains that it was this iteration that really hit with readers. “There was immediately a very present and active fandom around Carol when she became Captain Marvel that didn’t really exist before,” she says. “People were knitting hats with her symbol on it; cosplay was going nuts. The look was a part of that. People wanted this monetarily; they wanted this in a commercial way.” Within eight months of Captain Marvel No. 1’s release, Marvel had a script for the film.

If Captain Marvel had had a stronger backstory that had existed since the ’60s or ’70s, perhaps Carol Danvers’s super suit in the film would have been different. But because the 2012 version resonated with fans, that’s the look that ended up on Brie Larson.

There’s also a reason we’re now seeing a solo Captain Marvel film rather than one about a more historically famous female superhero. “Marvel Studios does not have the film rights to a lot of Marvel’s most famous female characters,” Polo explains.

“Because most of Marvel’s most famous female characters are X-Men characters or Sue Storm from the Fantastic Four,” she continues, “both of those the film licenses belong to 20th Century Fox, which means that soon they will belong to Disney again. But in the time that this movie was being greenlit, it was easy for Marvel Studios to look at what properties they had the rights to, and go, ‘This is our most famous female character, except for Black Widow.’ But the price tag on Scarlett Johansson as a leading lady is something that I think Marvel Studios was not willing to pay until very recently.”

Now that Marvel knows female superheroes can sell comic books and that women-led superhero movies can kill at the box office, we may be seeing a lot more variety.

It’s impossible to talk about Captain Marvel without talking about the fact that some comic book fans are very, very angry about it. Searching “Brie Larson” on YouTube will reveal titles like “Brie Larson is Ruining Marvel!” and “Why are people MAD at Brie Larson.” Right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro has weighed in, attacking Larson’s comments about diversity in film criticism for “backing the woke narrative.” Rotten Tomatoes even stopped allowing users to rate unreleased movies because of trolls review-bombing Captain Marvel.

The people behind these campaigns seem to delight in pitting Captain Marvel against another woman-led superhero movie currently at the box office, Alita: Battle Angel, perhaps as a defense against claims of sexism. James Woods, for instance, tweeted the distracted boyfriend meme showing moviegoers shirking Captain Marvel for Alita with the caption “When you have a choice, pick a movie where the studio doesn’t hate half its audience.”

Captain Marvel being woman-led is not the sole reason some fans hate it. It’s also not exclusively because Larson has spoken publicly about diversity — Alita star Rosa Salazar, who is Latinx, has also criticized politicians for rhetoric on building walls. And it’s not that Captain Marvel is the only superhero film with a “girl power” message — it’s hard to argue that Wonder Woman, for instance, doesn’t share the same, and it barely received a modicum of the backlash that Captain Marvel is facing.

It’s because Captain Marvel as a character, in her image and her personality, is emphatically not designed to appeal solely to male comics nerds. Polo explains that Alita doesn’t strike the same nerve because the character is more typical of female superheroes past.

“I think the reason they feel like Alita is approachable [is that she’s] their idea of what women should be like,” she says. “She’s small; she’s cute; she has a love interest in her movie; she’s surrounded by male characters who are sculpting her view of how the world works. She’s amnesiac at the beginning of the film.”

“Carol’s also amnesiac at the beginning of the film!” Polo adds. “But Carol’s story is about her own quest to find out who she is, and the male characters are there to have adjacent goals. Alita is from a male filmmaker, created by a male comics artist. Her body and her physical aesthetic value is very much more front and center, and on the table for consumption in a way that Carol’s isn’t.”

But this is also why Captain Marvel is so exciting. Whether the film is good or bad (most reviews lean towards “decent”), Carol Danvers is still a character we don’t see a ton of onscreen: The point isn’t to watch a hot actress punch a bunch of guys — even though that essentially is what we’re seeing. The point is that we finally get to watch the strongest Avenger — the one who presumably saves the day in Endgame — in action.